Monday, 10 September 2012

Tigers Five: the red-weather variety

I’m slightly at a loss as to how to review this novel.
Not only was this hyped heavily pre-publication – and subject to a rare bidding
war between publishers – it has received glowing reviews from both readers and
professsional reviewers since then. How to say that I found it not only
cliched, but bloodless and boring? Usually, I would rely on the old chestnut
that this ‘just wasn’t my kind of novel’ – unfortunately, it really is, and
that was part of the reason I was so excited to read it in the first place.

Nick and Hughes are settling into a rather
uncomfortable marriage after their long separation during the Second World War,
as Nick expresses her ennui by drinking endless martinis and shocking the
neighbours by wearing her new two-piece bathing suit in the garden. Nick’s
cousin, Helena, is also newly married to the unreliable Avery, although Nick
fondly remembers their camaderie during the war, when they drank gin from jelly
jars and dealt with the horrors of disintegrating stockings. Fast-forward
thirteen years and Nick’s daughter Daisy is struggling with the demands of
adolescence during a hot summer at the Tiger House, thrashing her rivals on the
tennis court but failing to win in games of flirtation. While Helena struggles
with depression, her peculiar son, Ed, watches everything that is happening and
begins to uncover secrets that have been long-buried. When the body of a local
girl is found, these existing tensions inevitably rise to boiling point and
relationships begin to break down.

From the back cover, one might assume Tigers in Red Weather is a long
set-piece, something like LP Hartley’s The
Go-Between, with the increasing summer heat proving the catalyst for
emotional revelations. Actually, it spans more than twenty years, and suffers
for it. At times, the plot seems to build momentum, drawing the reader in, but
no sooner are we engaged then the years skip forwards or backwards, and what
pace was gained is swiftly lost. This is particularly noticeable in the two
sections set in the 1940s. The novel begins strongly, with the sense of
pressure Nick feels expertly conveyed, and we immediately realise that she must
find some release, or something catastrophic will happen. However, this
immediate tension is resolved in a couple of pages – and the novel didn’t grip
me again until another flashback to the 1940s, when temptation visits another
character. Compounding this pacing problem, the novel uses the device of
multiple narrators, which can be extremely effective – however, once we leave
one character’s head, we never revisit them, which means that many of the
stories feel artificially unfinished and foreshortened.

However, it wasn’t only these structural problems that
made me feel this novel was a failure. Quite frankly, it didn’t seem sure what
it wanted to be. Lisa Kraussman seems to be gesturing towards The Beautiful and Damned, but ends up
with something that is closer to Revolutionary
Road, but without that novel’s fascinating analysis and insight. These
characters are not the decadent bohemians that Nick apes in her early chapters,
but essentially ordinary upper-class people with banal everyday problems to
deal with. The exception, of course, is the baffling Ed, but Kraussmann
characterises him in such a way that pretty much every cliché you can imagine
for such a boy is ticked off the list, with the unfortunate side-effect of
making the novel’s plot fairly predictable. In consequence, the novel falls
uneasily between two stools; it can’t decide whether it’s a glamorous thriller
about avant-garde people who drink whiskey sours and take drugs and engage in
exciting affairs, or whether it’s a much more mundane dissection of family
life. It is at least new to read about characters who are both boring and
dissolute.

Finally, I was not convinced by Kraussman’s writing.
She faces the double challenge of writing individual voices for each of her
characters, and placing these within a convincingly historical setting, and I
believe she falls short on both counts. The five characters who narrate sound
disconcertingly similar, and occasionally I found myself forgetting that we had
in fact switched narrators. It’s difficult to detail this in a review, but one
minor example is that both Hughes and Daisy describe Nick’s new skirt as
‘poppy-red’, a simile that seems too specific to be shared. And as for the
history, the novel has been well-researched and it shows – far too much. It
commits the irritating crime that a lot of historical novels share of
name-dropping brands and details to create ‘atmosphere’ – for example, when
Daisy lists her special possessions for little reason; ‘ten Archie comics; the
Silver City Pink nail polish she had brought at the five and dime... a pair of
oxidising copper clip-ons’. (Nick does a similar thing earlier on when she pointlessly
itemises the contents of her trunk.) The most striking thing about this novel,
in fact, is the title – borrowed from a 1915 Wallace Stevens poem – and although
Kraussmann tries to live up to that evocation of a life starved of imagination,
this wasn’t what I got from this.

Ultimately, I enjoyed reading most of this novel, but don’t believe the hype – this is
light fiction, little more.

[For my other posts on supposedly tiger-related novels, see Tigers One, on Lionel Shriver's The Female of the Species,Tigers Two, on Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch, Tigers Three, on Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and Tigers Four, on The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht.]

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ABOUT ME

I'm a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at St Anne's College, Oxford, and am also currently writing a novel (or three) in my 'spare time'. I like books, decaf coffee and cocktails, particularly dry martinis.